by Gina Kincade
Her brain screamed things like the fact that dragons didn’t exist. Simultaneously, thoughts swirled to reconcile the sight before her, to dig out of her mind a category of being that would rationally explain away this creature whose hot breath bathed her entire body, small puffs of smoke emanating from its long, regal nose. Crystalline white scales gleamed in the reappearance of the moonlight as the clouds parted to grant her a better look. The light made the creature appear the color of fresh fallen snow. This had not been what the meteorologist had predicted would fly tonight, though.
The beauty of the beast, with scales that sparkled like frozen snowflakes, was unrivaled in any picture she’d ever seen of a dragon. Painted ones of course, as you couldn’t take a photograph of something that didn’t exist. So, laying her cards on it being a hallucination seemed her best bet right now. Apparently she’d managed to get high on the night air, on the scent of threatening snow.
“You’re not real,” she mumbled to herself, causing the massive beast to cock its head to one side like a dog did when you spoke to them. Her sister’s dog, a German Shepard named Sheba, had done that when it caught one of the two words it knew like food or outside.
This was no puppy, though, not even a full-grown beast of a dog. This animal towered over her a few story's high. It continued to sit in a sovereign pose though she willed the image away. The moon behind him, or her, or it, now glimmered through the wings, making them look angelic despite the absence of feathers and the tattered edges.
“This isn’t happening,” she said out loud, forcefully, the effort scraping her dry throat. “I’m having a break down brought on by depression, anxiety, cold, something. Anything. If I could just pass out. If only. “Say something,” she begged of the beast. “No, on second thought, even if you can, please don’t. I might just have a heart attack.”
It lowered its head in response, shaking it to and fro, gently, with grace, yet the ice pick like horns that crowned the top of the head gave the gesture a threatening feel. She backed up, or more like inched along the ground on her ass, hoping the movements indiscernible. Not her luck, though, as her actions seemed to incite the thing. Its body tensed, front legs stiffening, lengthening, forcing its chest out further. With a snort near deafening, the beast opened its mouth a little. She actually waited for it to speak. This was some sort of hallucination. It had to be. So, she figured why wouldn’t it talk too?
“Go away,” she cried out in a low whisper.
The beast stomped all four feet on the ground as if repositioning, which only served to create small seismic tremors under her. She scrambled to her feet to run, the instinct finally kicking in beyond reason to run straight out of the labyrinth to her car in hope of finding her sanity there. One step, a stumble, and another straighter step later, she heard the whoosh of a backdraft, and felt the heat around her. Looking back over her shoulder, she stopped dead in her tracks. The monster circled its head creating flames around her, causing the untended grass that surrounded the labyrinth to catch fire instantaneously.
Trapped, she lost consciousness, her world fading to black as the beast lowered its head to her.
Chapter Two
As she opened and closed her eyes, coming out of a sleep-induced haze, a stress-induced headache registered. Her final moments of consciousness came roaring back, forcing blood to pump through constricted veins. Pain reverberated throughout, shooting through her body, waking sore, cold muscles. She brought her hands to her head, an excruciating yet instinctively necessary effort. She forced the heels of her hands into her temples and the clouds around her vision parted, giving way to a face peering into hers. Still rather out of it, woozy, she stared at the mix of ice blue eyes and almost white hair on this youthful male face with a prominent chin and chiseled cheekbones. The idea of passing out and waking on the cover of some romance novel with an alpha hero tickled her. Suddenly, a bout of stranger danger hit through the mesmerized fog.
Anna wiggled, moved to sit up, only to have strong arms embrace her tighter as his big hands gripped her outer arm and leg. Cradled in his arms, on his lap, her face came back to rest on the pale, flawless skin of a well-muscled chest. A peculiar blend of emotions warred inside of her from fear and anger, which seemed to be forcefully soothed by unexplainable comfort and lust. Her breathing released in pants, adding to the fog in her brain.
“It’s okay, Anna,” he said, his lips inches from her face.
“Let me go,” she cried as she struggled again with great a effort that rapidly succumbed to his strength even as her breaths became more even, normalized.
She wasn’t going anywhere he didn’t want her to go. The abrasive need to hate him for this feat of brawny force over her gave way to her—call it female instinct, intense sensibilities—of being drawn to him. Everything about his presence, not to mention what she could see of him, enticed her. The shouts of her brain about danger weakened to whispers.
“You’re okay,” he urged, his voice gravely. An insistent, soft hiss that challenged her urge to flee with being enticed. “I’ve got you. Rest.”
His tone alone made her body hum, right down to her core, stirring intimate longings long dormant inside of her. To be brutally honest with herself, this danger vibe he gave off made him even more alluring. Crazy? Of course. She’d been for some time, so none of this should have surprised her. Yet the way her body awakened in his arms, inspirited, grew ever alarming. More so since she hadn’t reacted this way to a man in sometime. Not that there had been any to react to since the accident had left her flawed—on the surface and underneath. She’d not been willing to share that with anyone, not that anyone of the male persuasion had offered. Honestly, she hadn’t let one close enough to even try.
“Where am I?” she asked, glancing at her surroundings, anything other than him, only to find them inside an empty room.
The light of the moon through the broken window illuminated the faded wallpaper falling from the walls in places. A floral pattern, maybe once a rose and green, hung at the corner. Following the releasing seam of paper to the floor, she found it filthy, just like the walls, and in a state of disrepair. All that remained was an abandoned colony of webs, their owners probably hiding out somewhere warm, or wherever it was spiders went when it grew cold out.
“An abandoned cabin of sorts, just a ways into the woods from the labyrinth,” he offered. “I needed to get you to safety and out of the cold.”
“Safety?” she asked, biting her tongue not to ask him where his shirt was or if he’d seen the mythological beast.
Hallucinations didn’t create fire around you hot enough to melt the clothing to your body. Hers was not singed to her, so this guy must have gotten her out seconds after the flames had burst up taller than she stood toward the sky. She smelled the smoke, though, and wondered how far from the labyrinth they were. Her mind filled with questions she didn’t dare ask him.
Anna moved to sit up again, but his firm grip became unyielding, relentless. Her last attempt at logic tried to evaluate her situation, the danger, her sanity, and her odds, along with what could possibly happen next. An unnatural calm settled over her. One she couldn’t understand, couldn’t reconcile to her current situation. The peace itself, the fact her body stopped trembling, her heart failed to beat hard in her chest, and her breathing had settled to a slow repetition of in and out, was pure lunacy.
“You doing that?” escaped her mouth, though she hadn’t meant it to.
For a moment he just stared at her as if he were about to kiss her. The intensity of his blue eyes gazing at her lips made them tingle. She attempted to lick away the sensation with her dry tongue. Failing miserably, the tingle trickling to other parts of her body, she bit her lip, taking a strange refuge in the small amount of control.
“Yes,” he finally answered when she’d expected him to ask what she meant.
“What? I don’t understand?”
“I know. And, I’m sorry for that. Truly sorry, Anna. I’m sorry to thrust
all of this upon you like this.”
“That’s twice you’ve said my name. I thought the first time I misheard, but I didn’t. How do you know who I am?” She thought to struggle again, but her body remained slack in his arms. Instead she ended up resisting the urge to cuddle up into him further.
“There’s so much to tell that I don’t know where to start. I don’t want to overwhelm you, but like the energy you study, I am using mine, a psychic connection if you will, to help you to stay calm for what I have to say.”
“I don’t want to be calm,” she said with a steady voice. She felt inclined to scream, to cry out, to tremble with fear, with anger, but she couldn’t hold onto the thoughts long enough. “You are making me insane here. You know stuff about me. My instincts are being forced silent. None of that makes any logical sense, and frankly, it is driving me mad. It’s not possible. I must be still dreaming or maybe hallucinating. Why not? This whole night has to be a dream from that thing I saw to the fire it created. I must have passed out from hypothermia at the labyrinth. Someone will find me. Wake me up. Soon. Right?”
“You are awake. I took you from the labyrinth. You weren’t safe there,” he insisted, his body tensing, only serving to accentuate the peaks and valleys of his chest beside her face, his abs against her side.
“Safe? You saw it then?” she dared ask now that the fear of asking had been wiped from her mind. Ironically, the only thing disturbing her at the moment was the absence of fear and panic.
“It?”
“The thing that started the fire?”
“I started the fire. As you began to run, I saw him, and I had to stop you, to be able to grab you safely and get you hidden. I didn’t mean to frighten you. I honestly didn’t, but you attracted his attention, and I had to come, the only way I could get to you in time,” he said in a rush of words uttered in a deep voice laced with anger and fear, giving her a sudden taste of the emotions before they were wiped away again.
“You…” she left off, unable to form a question at all after his onslaught of words.
“I know it doesn’t make sense to you yet, and I should probably just come out and tell you the truth and then deal with the fallout, but I’m afraid of seeing you look at me like I’m a monster,” he said as he hugged her to him again, tightly, wrapping her in the warmth of his body as he placed a hard, abrupt kiss on her forehead.
Her thoughts scrambled. His words had gotten lost when her heart skipped a beat or two. Her urges were to lift her mouth to meet his, to taste his full lips. She wanted the hands holding her to run over her body, to make her feel sexy, loved. That had to be the thing of it. He looked at her like she was beautiful, like looking at her made his pulse race. In these moments, as confusing as they had been, she’d not only remained in his arms, not struggling to get out, but she’d also forgotten her scars, felt like a woman again. She’d regressed to a time before the sadness, before the accident, when being in a man’s arms would have riled her. Her mind kept wondering more about if he were naked underneath where she sat on his lap, rather than what had just happened and how she’d come to be in this stranger’s arms, or who exactly he was.
In the absence of panic, her mind had settled on lust, longing, though foreign to her now. He’d claimed to have taken her, saved her. Yet, instead of fearing this stranger basically holding her against her will, or worrying what was out there would come back again, instead of scratching and clawing for a chance to live, she laid against him. Gazing into his eyes, she felt as if he looked through her, straight into her soul, that she could hide nothing from him. Scarier yet, she couldn’t come up with the appropriate emotions. None of this bothered her.
She licked her lips, heard him groan, a rumble in his chest, before she pleaded, “Just tell me what you are talking about. The truth. I don’t get why I’m calm, or how, if you are telling the truth that you are causing it, but I at least deserve the truth, to know my fate.”
“I’m your fate, and you are mine,” he stated with a sigh. “Finally, after all of this time, I get to touch you, not just watch you from afar.”
“Now, statements like that should creep me the hell out. And you should hear panic in my voice. So, none of this makes sense to me. I actually want to be scared because it would at least make sense. Come on. I’m losing my mind here, so out with it. I obviously can’t over power you. Sure, I’m not telling you anything you don’t know. You seem to have some inhuman strength, body builder type I’m guessing. So, just tell me. Please. You owe me that before you kill me, or take me away, or whatever you plan on doing with me now that you have me drugged. Yes, that has to be it, you took me and drugged me to remain calm.”
“I didn’t, Anna. Honestly. I saved you, but I did not drug you.”
“Start with your name, because I want to be freaked out by the fact you keep saying mine,” she huffed, finding it odd the hint of grumpiness that had found its way through her forced, peaceful fog added a slight edge to her voice.
“Grael. My name is Grael.”
“Okay. That is something.”
She heard his heartbeat accelerate when she laid her head on his chest. Tensing her body, she tried not to kiss him right there over where it thumped. If she were to be completely honest with herself, his nipple served as a distraction, a hard bud in this cold, just inches from her lips. She wanted to kiss it, bite it. Worse, she wanted him to drop her on the floor and lay his body out over hers. To feel the crush of his weight. That is, after she got a good look at him from head to toe, to see what the rest of his body looked like and if he wore pants or not. She shivered in his arms, but not from any chill in the air.
She’d lost her mind officially. Drugs or not. One didn’t lust for their kidnapper. One panicked to the point of losing their mind. Fight or flight and all that shit.
“I’m your mate, or more, you are mine. That is the attraction you are feeling. I’ve known this for some time, and I’ve watched you,” he began.
“Watched? As in stalked?” Come on. Get upset about that, she yelled at herself.
“No, not stalked. I watched, as in guarded. You were not ready for me. All you have been through, all the loss you’ve suffered. Your shattered soul was not ready to deal with all I would bring to your life. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when fate chose a human as my mate, given I am a messenger to this realm, but in a cruel twist of fate, right as I found out about you, your life fell apart.”
Different words rolled through her brain, knocking around like a pinball in a machine being played. Guarded. Shattered. Mate. Realm. Processing it proved confusing enough without mention of the car accident not bringing about the crush of emotions that incapacitated her any other time.
“I am calming you. Will continue to until we get everything out in the open. I know you can’t handle me now, but you, with your meditation and your stones, maybe your shattered soul, you attracted the attention tonight to the worst of my kind. You were in danger. Your life was in danger. The thought of what he would have done to you…I had no choice but to save you. And, to save you I had to be seen by you.”
“Danger? Your kind? Realm? Seen? You mean naked? I mean, are you naked? Sorry, I shouldn’t have asked that. It hardly matters against the rest of it, but it is cold outside and you have no shirt on. Yet, you don’t shiver. A girl needs to know why,” she rambled on, blinking, shaking her head, yet looking right at him, unable to tear her gaze away from the sincere pain that clouded his blue eyes like the threat of snow had the clouds over the moon earlier, threatening moisture.
“No, not naked! Well, I am at the minute, but that is not what I am speaking of. First, as to how you are feeling, I am calming your fears and so, overriding that, all that is left is your pull toward me. Second, your eyes didn’t deceive you, Anna. I was the dragon. My name is Grael, and I am classified as a Snow Dragon, from the clan of Kyrzis who sired the first of the messengers between our worlds, between humans who know of us and the dragons. That makes me a dragon shifte
r, able to be the same as those I communicate with no matter what realm I am in. I can choose my shape. Third, and I will make it the last for now, dragons are fated to the mates best suited to them, and you are mine.”
She reclined in his arms, the words he said processing, well registering, but not fitting into anything she knew of the real world. Rather, they made sense in what she knew of mythology and lore, which was little as English class had never been her favorite subject. If they’d had a class for dressing fashionably, that would have been right up her ally, but not dragons and knights in shining armor. She couldn’t even remember if they fought together or against each other.
“Please say something?” he begged, getting his lips close to her forehead again, but then sighing, keeping himself mere inches from her.
Holding back the need to reach up, take his gorgeous face in her hands and kiss him senseless, to the point of feeling like she did with this information, she bit her lip instead. She shook her head in answer to his plea.
Act normal. Feel something appropriate already! she screamed in her head. This lunatic has taken you. React, damn it!
“I don’t know what to say. I don’t even know what to think, and you’ve drugged me so I don’t know how to even feel. I should fear you. You are talking insane. And, some part of me knows that, though I can’t for the life of me react to it. I should be scared. Terrified, and yet, whatever you gave me just makes me want to kiss you. I’ve heard about drugs like that. All of this is infuriating. In fact, if I could manage to hold onto that anger for more than a brief second, maybe I would feel a little normal. If I live until this drug wears off, I don’t even know what next. That should scare me. Damn you! I want—”
He cut her off with a kiss. This she reacted to with every fiber of her being, on a molecular level that curled her toes and hardened her nipples, making the nubs beg to be touched, revealed, and bitten. A part of her recalled such physical responses, though they seemed a lifetime ago. Yet, never had she come apart like this from just the union of lips to lips. Her stomach tightened over the fluttering there, brewing contractions that rippled through her core to make her wet in a place she’d not thought about being touched in over a year. She’d numbed every part of her, and now it was all coming back to life with a vengeance.
